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Nice. Especially because it offers Open Firmware and EFI payloads: http://www.coreboot.org/Payloads

I'm guessing that doing init work on 3rd party expansion cards is left up to the OS. This makes sense, but might be troublesome for poorly designed adapters...

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What role, then, do Open Firmware and EFI play if the hardware is being initialized by coreboot?

--hardware/low-level noob (bare with me)

The traditional x86 hardware init scheme is to run x86 machine code from ROM's on the expansion cards. This of course limits the cards to only being used in machines that can execute x86 machine code.

Open Firmware replaces this with Forth code on the card and a Forth interpreter. This is how PowerPC Macs and Sun Sparc hardware would load card drivers.

EFI's driver functionality is pretty much the same as Open Firmware, except it uses an EFI Byte Code (EBC) as it's language.

Yeah best to avoid them. It works best if you buy hardware around what works, rather than trying to work with poor undocumented stuff.

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